Detroit, are you ready to speak your truth? This city is a place where several layers of truth coexist—sometimes peacefully, sometimes in harsh opposition. Many aspects of Detroit are painted as black-and-white issues, when it is, in reality, a place that contains various shades of gray and a lot of personal stories. Seeking truth is […]
There are a lot of people out there telling us the “truth” about Detroit, the “truth” about its neighborhoods, the ‘’truth” about its people, and, given this is an election year, their version of the “truth” about just about anything.Has anyone asked you?Well, the Cranbrook Art Museum is going to.
The Truth Booth — a giant, inflatable, portable enclosure in the shape of a thought bubble — will make its way across Detroit and Flint over the next two weeks.The cartoonish pop-up bubble is a participatory public art installation that functions as a video recording studio. Visitors are invited inside an intimate white space to give semi-anonymous testimonial in two minutes or less. The only directions are to complete the simple thought, “The truth is...”
Cranbrook Time Machine: Twentieth-Century Period Rooms draws its inspiration from traditional museum period rooms, reinventing that presentation model by featuring distinct spaces that examine key moments in Cranbrook’s history. As a contemporary interpretation of such spaces, this exhibition features four distinct rooms that examine key moments in the evolution of the twentieth-century domestic landscape: The […]
Edward Gorey’s masterful pen-and-ink drawings that illustrate his captivating books conjure a vaguely Edwardian world of handcars, boater hats, and Dickensian children. With titles such as The Hapless Child, The Loathsome Couple, and The Fatal Lozenge, Gorey’s protagonists often meet an untimely demise. Despite the subject matter, his work transcends the mere macabre, offering instead […]
Bloomfield Hills, Mich., July 18, 2016— On July 31, Cranbrook Art Museum will kick-off the local tour of the public artwork In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth). The Truth Booth is a portable, inflatable video recording studio in the shape of a giant speech bubble. A Cause Collective project by artists Ryan Alexiev, Jim Ricks, Will Sylvester and Hank Willis Thomas, its interior is equipped to compile video responses by hundreds of people from different cultural backgrounds as they complete the sentence: “The Truth Is…”
The words “hippie” and “modernism” may seem to be opposing upon first glance. The anti-establishment rhetoric espoused by the late 1960s hippies, known for their agrarian practices, flowy outfits, mantras of peace and love and a communal lifestyle, do not exactly scream “modern.” However, in their adaptive and innovative dealings with the era’s new technology and media, these hippies found creative approaches for societal betterment that can be seen in many commonly accepted practices today.The Cranbrook Art Museum’s new exhibit, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, which is open now through October 9th, explores this tension and eventual reconciliation between what exactly makes the hippie so modern in a 21st-century lens. It is currently on its second stop on its three-city national tour, starting at the Walker Art Center and ending at the University of California Berkeley.
If you lack the tolerance for Hollywood blockbusters, here’s a tip to beat the heat in Detroit this summer: Take in “CC5 Hendrixwar/Cosmococa Programa-in-Progress,” the full-gallery installation of a work by Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida. Tucked away in the furthest reaches of “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia” at Cranbrook Art Museum, the installation comes complete with gratifying tunes, soothing visual projections and hammocks.
For nearly five decades, John Glick has labored in his studio in Farmington Hills while developing a reputation as a “People’s Potter.”Now the Cranbrook Art Museum has organized a major retrospective of his work, “John Glick: A Legacy in Clay,” on display this summer at the Cranbrook Museum of Art in Bloomfield Hills.
For Andrew Blauvelt, the June 18 opening of “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia” at the Cranbrook Art Museum represents both a scholarly interest and a chance to bring to life a piece of Cranbrook’s own history.
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